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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
In this infrared photograph, the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California, beams its eight-laser beacon to the Deep Space Optical Communications flight laser transceiver aboard NASA’s Psyche spacecraft.NASA/JPL-Caltech The project has exceeded all of its technical goals after two years, setting up the foundations of high-speed communications for NASA’s future human missions to Mars.
NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications technology successfully showed that data encoded in lasers could be reliably transmitted, received, and decoded after traveling millions of miles from Earth at distances comparable to Mars. Nearly two years after launching aboard the agency’s Psyche mission in 2023, the technology demonstration recently completed its 65th and final pass, sending a laser signal to Psyche and receiving the return signal, from 218 million miles away.
“NASA is setting America on the path to Mars, and advancing laser communications technologies brings us one step closer to streaming high-definition video and delivering valuable data from the Martian surface faster than ever before,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “Technology unlocks discovery, and we are committed to testing and proving the capabilities needed to enable the Golden Age of exploration.”
This video details how the Deep Space Optical Communications experiment broke records and how the technology demonstration could pave the way for future high-bandwidth data transmission out to Mars distances and beyond. NASA/JPL-Caltech Record-breaking technology
Just a month after launch, the Deep Space Optical Communications demonstration proved it could send a signal back to Earth it established a link with the optical terminal aboard the Psyche spacecraft.
“NASA Technology tests hardware in the harsh environment of space to understand its limits and prove its capabilities,” said Clayton Turner, associate administrator, Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Over two years, this technology surpassed our expectations, demonstrating data rates comparable to those of household broadband internet and sending engineering and test data to Earth from record-breaking distances.”
On Dec. 11, 2023, the demonstration achieved a historic first by streaming an ultra-high-definition video to Earth from over 19 million miles away (about 80 times the distance between Earth and the Moon), at the system’s maximum bitrate of 267 megabits per second. The project also surpassed optical communications distance records on Dec. 3, 2024, when it downlinked Psyche data from 307 million miles away (farther than the average distance between Earth and Mars). In total, the experiment’s ground terminals received 13.6 terabits of data from Psyche.
How it works
Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, the experiment consists of a flight laser transceiver mounted on the Psyche spacecraft, along with two ground stations to receive and send data from Earth. A powerful 3-kilowatt uplink laser at JPL’s Table Mountain Facility transmitted a laser beacon to Psyche, helping the transceiver determine where to aim the optical communications laser back to Earth.
Both Psyche and Earth are moving through space at tremendous speeds, and they are so distant from each other that the laser signal — which travels at the speed of light — can take several minutes to reach its destination. By using the precise pointing required from the ground and flight laser transmitters to close the communication link, teams at NASA proved that optical communications can be done to support future missions throughout the solar system.
Another element of the experiment included detecting and decoding a faint signal after the laser traveled millions of miles. The project enlisted a 200-inch telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County as its primary downlink station, which provided enough light-collecting area to collect the faintest photons. Those photons were then directed to a high-efficiency detector array at the observatory, where the information encoded in the photons could be processed.
“We faced many challenges, from weather events that shuttered our ground stations to wildfires in Southern California that impacted our team members,” said Abi Biswas, Deep Space Optical Communications project technologist and supervisor at JPL. “But we persevered, and I am proud that our team embraced the weekly routine of optically transmitting and receiving data from Psyche. We constantly improved performance and added capabilities to get used to this novel kind of deep space communication, stretching the technology to its limits.”
Brilliant new era
In another test, data was downlinked to an experimental radio frequency-optical “hybrid” antenna at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone complex near Barstow, California. The antenna was retrofitted with an array of seven mirrors, totaling 3 feet in diameter, enabling the antenna to receive radio frequency and optical signals from Psyche simultaneously.
The project also used Caltech’s Palomar Observatory and a smaller 1-meter telescope at Table Mountain to receive the same signal from Psyche. Known as “arraying,” this is commonly done with radio antennas to better receive weak signals and build redundancy into the system.
“As space exploration continues to evolve, so do our data transfer needs,” said Kevin Coggins, deputy associate administrator, NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program at the agency’s headquarters. “Future space missions will require astronauts to send high-resolution images and instrument data from the Moon and Mars back to Earth. Bolstering our capabilities of traditional radio frequency communications with the power and benefits of optical communications will allow NASA to meet these new requirements.”
This demonstration is the latest in a series of optical communication experiments funded by the Space Technology Mission Directorate’s Technology Demonstration Missions Program managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the agency’s SCaN program within the Space Operations Mission Directorate. The Psyche mission is led by Arizona State University. Lindy Elkins-Tanton of the University of California, Berkeley is the principal investigator. NASA JPL, managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, is responsible for the mission’s overall management.
To learn more about the laser communications demo, visit:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/deep-space-optical-communications-dsoc/
NASA’s Laser Comms Demo Makes Deep Space Record, Completes First Phase NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space via Laser Teachable Moment: The NASA Cat Video Explained News Media Contact
Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 18, 2025 Related Terms
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2 min read NASA Gateways to Blue Skies 2026 Competition
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By NASA
The commercial aviation industry is a crucial component of the U.S. economy, playing a vital role in transporting people, intermediate/final goods, and driving demand for various goods and services nationwide. This network enhances the quality of life for the whole country and facilitates business interactions within and globally, boosting productivity and prosperity. However, the industry faces numerous challenges, particularly the need to reduce rising operational costs in a growing market to accommodate increased demand in air travel, e-commerce, and cargo sectors. Issues such as aging aircraft and components, technological advancements, and staffing shortages further complicate these challenges, hindering efforts to balance passenger safety with operational efficiency. To address these challenges, the industry needs to swiftly innovate and implement more efficient and resilient aircraft maintenance practices, including the adoption of new technologies. In the 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies Competition, teams will conceptualize novel aviation maintenance advancements that can be implemented by 2035 or sooner with the goal of improving efficiency, safety, and/or costs for the industry. Teams are encouraged to consider high-potential technologies and systems that aren’t currently mainstream or highly regarded as becoming mainstream in the future, imagining beyond the status quo.
Award: $72,000 in total prizes
Open Date: Phase 1 – September 18, 2025; Phase 2 – March 13, 2026
Close Date: Phase 1 – February 16, 2026; Phase 2- May 15, 2026
For more information, visit: https://blueskies.nianet.org/competition/
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By NASA
An artist’s concept of a supermassive black hole, a surrounding disk of material falling towards the black hole and a jet containing particles moving away at close to the speed of light. This black hole represents a recently-discovered quasar powered by a black hole. New Chandra observations indicate that the black hole is growing at a rate that exceeds the usual limit for black holes, called the Eddington Limit. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. WeissX-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF-Brera/L. Ighina et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk A black hole is growing at one of the fastest rates ever recorded, according to a team of astronomers. This discovery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory may help explain how some black holes can reach enormous masses relatively quickly after the big bang.
The black hole weighs about a billion times the mass of the Sun and is located about 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, meaning that astronomers are seeing it only 920 million years after the universe began. It is producing more X-rays than any other black hole seen in the first billion years of the universe.
The black hole is powering what scientists call a quasar, an extremely bright object that outshines entire galaxies. The power source of this glowing monster is large amounts of matter funneling around and entering the black hole.
While the same team discovered it two years ago, it took observations from Chandra in 2023 to discover what sets this quasar, RACS J0320-35, apart. The X-ray data reveal that this black hole appears to be growing at a rate that exceeds the normal limit for these objects.
“It was a bit shocking to see this black hole growing by leaps and bounds,” said Luca Ighina of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the study.
When matter is pulled toward a black hole it is heated and produces intense radiation over a broad spectrum, including X-rays and optical light. This radiation creates pressure on the infalling material. When the rate of infalling matter reaches a critical value, the radiation pressure balances the black hole’s gravity, and matter cannot normally fall inwards any more rapidly. That maximum is referred to as the Eddington limit.
Scientists think that black holes growing more slowly than the Eddington limit need to be born with masses of about 10,000 Suns or more so they can reach a billion solar masses within a billion years after the big bang — as has been observed in RACS J0320-35. A black hole with such a high birth mass could directly result from an exotic process: the collapse of a huge cloud of dense gas containing unusually low amounts of elements heavier than helium, conditions that may be extremely rare.
If RACS J0320-35 is indeed growing at a high rate — estimated at 2.4 times the Eddington limit — and has done so for a sustained amount of time, its black hole could have started out in a more conventional way, with a mass less than a hundred Suns, caused by the implosion of a massive star.
“By knowing the mass of the black hole and working out how quickly it’s growing, we’re able to work backward to estimate how massive it could have been at birth,” said co-author Alberto Moretti of INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera in Italy. “With this calculation we can now test different ideas on how black holes are born.”
To figure out how fast this black hole is growing (between 300 and 3,000 Suns per year), the researchers compared theoretical models with the X-ray signature, or spectrum, from Chandra, which gives the amounts of X-rays at different energies. They found the Chandra spectrum closely matched what they expected from models of a black hole growing faster than the Eddington limit. Data from optical and infrared light also supports the interpretation that this black hole is packing on weight faster than the Eddington limit allows.
“How did the universe create the first generation of black holes?” said co-author Thomas of Connor, also of the Center for Astrophysics. “This remains one of the biggest questions in astrophysics and this one object is helping us chase down the answer.”
Another scientific mystery addressed by this result concerns the cause of jets of particles that move away from some black holes at close to the speed of light, as seen in RACS J0320-35. Jets like this are rare for quasars, which may mean that the rapid rate of growth of the black hole is somehow contributing to the creation of these jets.
The quasar was previously discovered as part of a radio telescope survey using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, combined with optical data from the Dark Energy Camera, an instrument mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The U.S. National Science Foundation National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory’s Gemini-South Telescope on Cerro Pachon, Chile was used to obtain the accurate distance of RACS J0320-35.
A paper describing these results has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available here.
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/chandra
https://chandra.si.edu
Visual Description
This release features a quasar located 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, presented as an artist’s illustration and an X-ray image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
In the artist’s illustration, the quasar, RACS J0320-35, sits at our upper left, filling the left side of the image. It resembles a spiraling, motion-blurred disk of orange, red, and yellow streaks. At the center of the disk, surrounded by a glowing, sparking, brilliant yellow light, is a black egg shape. This is a black hole, one of the fastest-growing black holes ever detected. The black hole is also shown in a small Chandra X-ray image inset at our upper right. In that depiction, the black hole appears as a white dot with an outer ring of neon purple.
The artist’s illustration also highlights a jet of particles blasting away from the black hole at the center of the quasar. The streaked silver beam starts at the core of the distant quasar, near our upper left, and shoots down toward our lower right. The blurry beam of energetic particles appears to widen as it draws closer and exits the image.
News Media Contact
Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center
Cambridge, Mass.
617-496-7998
mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu
Corinne Beckinger
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
256-544-0034
corinne.m.beckinger@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Sep 18, 2025 EditorLee MohonContactCorinne M. Beckingercorinne.m.beckinger@nasa.govLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
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5 min read New NASA Mission to Reveal Earth’s Invisible ‘Halo’
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By NASA
5 min read
New NASA Mission to Reveal Earth’s Invisible ‘Halo’
A new NASA mission will capture images of Earth’s invisible “halo,” the faint light given off by our planet’s outermost atmospheric layer, the exosphere, as it morphs and changes in response to the Sun. Understanding the physics of the exosphere is a key step toward forecasting dangerous conditions in near-Earth space, a requirement for protecting Artemis astronauts traveling through the region on the way to the Moon or on future trips to Mars. The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23.
Revealing Earth’s invisible edge
In the early 1970s, scientists could only speculate about how far Earth’s atmosphere extended into space. The mystery was rooted in the exosphere, our atmosphere’s outermost layer, which begins some 300 miles up. Theorists conceived of it as a cloud of hydrogen atoms — the lightest element in existence — that had risen so high the atoms were actively escaping into space.
But the exosphere reveals itself only via a faint “halo” of ultraviolet light known as the geocorona. Pioneering scientist and engineer Dr. George Carruthers set himself the task of seeing it. After launching a few prototypes on test rockets, he developed an ultraviolet camera ready for a one-way trip to space.
Apollo 16 astronaut John Young is pictured on the lunar surface with George Carruthers’ gold-plated Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, the first Moon-based observatory. The Lunar Module “Orion” is on the right and the Lunar Roving Vehicle is parked in the background next to the American flag. NASA In April 1972, Apollo 16 astronauts placed Carruthers’ camera on the Moon’s Descartes Highlands, and humanity got its first glimpse of Earth’s geocorona. The images it produced were as stunning for what they captured as they were for what they didn’t.
“The camera wasn’t far enough away, being at the Moon, to get the entire field of view,” said Lara Waldrop, principal investigator for the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory. “And that was really shocking — that this light, fluffy cloud of hydrogen around the Earth could extend that far from the surface.” Waldrop leads the mission from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where George Carruthers was an alumnus.
The first image of UV light from Earth’s outer atmosphere, the geocorona, taken from a telescope designed and built by George Carruthers. The telescope took the image while on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. G. Carruthers (NRL) et al./Far UV Camera/NASA/Apollo 16 Our planet, in a new light
Today, the exosphere is thought to stretch at least halfway to the Moon. But the reasons for studying go beyond curiosity about its size.
As solar eruptions reach Earth, they hit the exosphere first, setting off a chain of reactions that sometimes culminate in dangerous space weather storms. Understanding the exosphere’s response is important to predicting and mitigating the effects of these storms. In addition, hydrogen — one of the atomic building blocks of water, or H2O — escapes through the exosphere. Mapping that escape process will shed light on why Earth retains water while other planets don’t, helping us find exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, that might do the same.
NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, named in honor of George Carruthers, is designed to capture the first continuous movies of Earth’s exosphere, revealing its full expanse and internal dynamics.
“We’ve never had a mission before that was dedicated to making exospheric observations,” said Alex Glocer, the Carruthers mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s really exciting that we’re going to get these measurements for the first time.”
Download this video from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
Journey to L1
At 531 pounds and roughly the size of a loveseat sofa, the Carruthers spacecraft will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) spacecraft and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s SWFO-L1 (Space Weather Follow On – Lagrange 1) space weather satellite. After launch, all three missions will commence a four-month cruise phase to Lagrange point 1 (L1), a location approximately 1 million miles closer to the Sun than Earth is. After a one-month period for science checkouts, Carruthers’ two-year science phase will begin in March 2026.
Artist’s concept of the five Sun-Earth Lagrange points in space. At Lagrange points, the gravitational pull of two large masses counteract, allowing spacecraft to reduce fuel consumption needed to remain in position. The L1 point of the Earth-Sun system affords an uninterrupted view of the Sun and will be home to three new heliophysics missions in 2025: NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and NOAA’s Space Weather Follow-On – Lagrange 1 (SWFO – L1). NASA’s Conceptual Image Lab/Krystofer Kim From L1, roughly four times farther away than the Moon, Carruthers will capture a comprehensive view of the exosphere using two ultraviolet cameras, a near-field imager and a wide-field imager.
“The near-field imager lets you zoom up really close to see how the exosphere is varying close to the planet,” Glocer said. “The wide-field imager lets you see the full scope and expanse of the exosphere, and how it’s changing far away from the Earth’s surface.”
The two imagers will together map hydrogen atoms as they move through the exosphere and ultimately out to space. But what we learn about atmospheric escape on our home planet applies far beyond it.
“Understanding how that works at Earth will greatly inform our understanding of exoplanets and how quickly their atmospheres can escape,” Waldrop said.
By studying the physics of Earth, the one planet we know that supports life, the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory can help us know what to look for elsewhere in the universe.
The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission is led by Lara Waldrop from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley leads mission implementation, design and development of the payload in collaboration with Utah State University’s Space Dynamics Laboratory. The Carruthers spacecraft was designed and built by BAE Systems. NASA’s Explorers and Heliophysics Projects Division at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the mission for the agency’s Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
By Miles Hatfield
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 18, 2025 Related Terms
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